FBTB presents MOC Madness 2010 Building Tournament [Contest]

If you’re looking for a good bounty, suit up and enter the MOC Madness Building Tournament hosted by FBTB. Build a bounty hunter and bounty hunter ship and you could win some awesome prizes including a white Boba Fett minifig. Each qualifying entry advances tournament style so you can root for your favorites, or better yet, be the favorite.

Post navigation

Interesting contest, but that auto-play music on the site is so incredibly annoying that I clicked away after less than a minute of searching for a way to turn it off. A major web design foul and it just cost them a potential participant.

^^ Design foul. It’s not that I dislike the song, it’s that making a user’s browser unexpectedly start making a lot of noise with no visible control for turning it off is inconsiderate and simply bad design, full stop. It has been so for at least 15 years and it still amazes me when people who ought to know better do it.

^ Your call, but it strikes me as unwise to drive away visitors because you thought it was neat to make everyone’s browser play “Eye of the Tiger”–it’s the sort of thing I’d expect to see on a MySpace page, not a community web site. I may be the only person who’s complained, but I guarantee you I’m not the only person hastily hitting the back button or closing the tab.

Like most people, I do more than one thing with my computer at a time. Some of those things make sounds that I need to hear. Telling me that I should just turn off the sound when a web page hijacks my browser to make noise is a really inappropriate response to what is fundamentally a bad design decision that is inconsiderate to visitors. It’s like telling me to shut my windows on a hot day if I don’t like the fact that someone’s parked in front of my house and started blasting music.

If you must automatically play music on a web page, you need to provide obvious controls that allow visitors to turn it off. Otherwise you’re going to alienate a lot of people–even people like me who might actually like the song you’re playing if I wasn’t being forced to listen to it over my own music and notifications.

I’m with Catsy on this: the forced music is irritating and certainly not design awesome. I can’t help but feel that, once again, proof is given the the FBTB ‘mods’ (and I use the word losely) are more concerned with their own jokes than with the larger community. No wonder the FBTB forum is lucky to get five posts per day, nowadays…

That said, I do agree that automatic music on a web page is an old convention and I thought it had been largely done away with. However, it doesn’t really affect my opinion of the contest and I do hope that people can look past it and build cool MOCs.

While I appreciate the backup from alldarker, I need to point out that I’m not trying to make any kind of overarching point about the people at FBTB or how they treat their forum residents. I don’t frequent that forum but I’m fond of the value they contribute to the greater Lego community, which is part of what made this experience more frustrating.

To anyone still following this, the music was cut from the page a couple days ago, and we’ve also lifted the “only members who joined before June 30th” rule. All are welcome to participate, as long as the other requirements are met!

The Brothers Brick respects your online privacy and security. In accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) effective on May 25, 2018, we are providing greater transparency, and we are enabling new privacy controls so you can choose how The Brothers Brick handles your personal information.

Privacy Preference Center

Consent Management

The Brothers Brick Privacy Policy provides details on the types of personal information (or user data) we collect, how we process and store that data, and how you can request removal of your user data.

Marketing & Advertising Cookies

The Brothers Brick relies on a variety of online advertising partners and technology platforms to fund operation of the world's most popular LEGO hobbyist website. These cookies enable our advertising partners to display relevant advertising to you.